A riddle for you today, and another one next time. There’s a method to my madness this time, though, because I want to talk about Hint 0 and why it’s so important for the kinds of riddles I like. (Hint 0: A solution exists.) Today’s riddle is much easier, I think, if you take Hint 0 into account. It’s even more important for the follow-up.

As a reward for your valiant service as a knight, the King offers you the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. The oldest daughter always tells the truth. The middle daughter may tell the truth or lie, arbitrarily. The youngest daughter always lies. Of course, you don’t know which daughter is which. You want to make sure you marry either the oldest daughter or the youngest. (If you marry the liar, at least you know where you stand.) You only get to ask one yes-or-no question of one daughter. How can you use this question to pick a daughter who meets your goal?

Clarifications: If it makes your questions more convenient, you may assume the daughters have names, say, Anne, Beth, and Carol. You cannot ask a question that the daughter might not know the answer to. For instance, you cannot ask “What would Beth say if I asked her if she is the oldest daughter?” because if Beth is the middle daughter, the other two wouldn’t know.

Hint 1: Strictly speaking, you don’t need the oldest/middle/youngest designations, but it makes the question you ask a lot more elegant.

I had the chance to play Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon City recently. The brief verdict is that it’s definitely excellent medium-crunchy Knizia work. It’s as good as Taj Majal, I think, although the mechanic of the game is almost exactly the opposite. Allow me to explain.

In Taj Majal, there are two major ways to score points. You can play for economic power and pick up commodities, or you can play for courtly power and connect roads. (The Princess provides a great secondary source if you can hang onto her.) Both major sources increase quadratically as the game progresses; so the first tea you collect is only worth 1 VP, but the second is worth 2, the third is worth 3… Likewise, if you can get enough palaces in place and connect many provinces with roads, they also spiral up in value. But the key is that, in every step of the game, you basically have to bid against the other players for each of these resources; but even if you don’t win the auction, you lose everything you bid. So you need to make everyone believe you are strong. Winning battles without a fight is wonderful; winning a hard-fought battle can be OK if you only have to do it once; but losing a hard-fought battle is disaster. And the stakes only go up with every round.

In Blue Moon City, by contrast, the key is convincing other players to do your work for you. In brief:

• To win, you need to collect crystals, which are like mini-VP, and buy four actual VP before anyone else does. As VP are purchased, they become more expensive for everyone, so buying them early is worthwhile.
• The resource of the game is cards, of varying suits and a strength from 1-3. Cards of low strength have special abilities that I won’t go into here (like letting you make other cards wild, etc.)
• The board is laid out in a grid. Every square requires a certain set of powers of cards in a certain suit. So for example, one square might require players to donate (in separate increments, although a given player can pay more than one of them) 5 Blue, 4 Blue, and 3 Blue.
• Every square has two rewards: a primary reward, which the person who contributed the most to it gets, and a secondary reward, which everyone who contributed to it gets. These rewards are handed out only when the square is entirely finished. (Rewards can take the form of either crystals or bonus cards, depending on the square.)
• When a square is finished, it increases the secondary reward of all adjacent squares by a certain amount.

So in complete contrast with Taj Majal, in Blue Moon City you need to be working in the same place as your opponents. But you still want to score those nice primary rewards as much as you can. It’s well-developed and the balance is, of course, elegant. It bears multiple playings in a sitting. I’m not sure if it’s a run-out-and-buy title, but I’d certainly play again.

I don’t play Magic any more, but I have a new style of match I would like to see. I thought of the idea when thinking of Magic, but I think it would work for any quick-playing game, collectible or otherwise, where each player brings their own deck or equivalent to the game. Noncollectible examples might include Button Men or Brawl.

The way it works is this: You bring five decks/buttons/whatever to the match. Beforehand, you specify the order that the decks will play in, first through fifth. (This order is considered an integral part of your lineup and, if this were a tournament, you could not change it any more than you could change the composition of your decks.) In the first game, each player uses their first deck. For the next game, the loser puts the first deck aside and moves onto the second deck, while the winner stays on the same one. This proceeds until one player wins 5 games, eliminating all of the opponent’s decks.

(This does make the match best 5 of 9, which might be a lot; 4 of 7 or 3 of 5 would also work.)

I like this because it encourages players to have a good idea of what is going on in the environment. You need to carefully select your deck order, with a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of every deck. Two adjacent decks shouldn’t have the same weakness! Preferably, Deck 2 should be strong against the decks Deck 1 is weak against, and so on. Still, of course, you’d like every deck to be strong enough in its own right to beat any old other deck.

Depending on the environment, it might or might not benefit from a rule that indicates that you can’t duplicate decks. In Button Men, this is easy (you can’t use the same button twice); in Magic you would need a rule like “no two of your decks may have in common more than 8 non-land cards.” I’m not worried about a player taking 5 identical decks; I’m worried about 2 identical decks, played ABABA. Depending on the depth of the environment, two strong decks played in this way could be a solid strategy. I would much rather have an environment deep enough that ABABA doesn’t work very well than just legislate against it in the tournament rules.

It appears that the most provoking articles are the ones where I’m wrong or at least wildly off base in some regard.

In an experiment to see how strong this effect really is, I have only one thought for you today: Although Settlers of Catan is a great game for many reasons, the absolute best thing about it is the really slick ranged combat mechanic.

Discuss.

This riddle was related to me by intrepid reader John Rhoadhouse. If nobody has posted the answer by the time the next article goes up, I will post the answer in a comment at that time.

John went to a party with his date, Marie. At the party were three other couples, for a total of 8 people. During the night a certain number of people shook hands with each other. Nobody shook hands with their own date, nor with themselves. Afterwards John asked each person how many hands he or she had shaken. Each person gave a different answer.

How many hands did Marie shake?

Clarifications: John doesn’t ask himself how many hands he has shaken, and he is allowed to duplicate one of the other guests; in fact, a little consideration reveals that his number of handshakes must duplicate one of the other guests’.

Hint 0: A solution exists. There is no need for guessing or trickery.

The enormous, fundamental difference between a collectible card game (CCG) and an ordinary board or card game is, of course, that the rules for a CCG are (mostly) written on the cards themselves, whereas for most other games, the rules are external. The reasons for this are twofold: first, the rules for a CCG are inherently much more complex; second, you can’t print all the rules for a CCG in one place, because new cards keep getting added—that’s why it’s collectible. It’s amusing to think of, say, a chess set where the Bishop is a little square token that reads “Bishop: Moves any number of squares along a diagonal line.” Or “King of Hearts: Counts as a Heart. If played to a trick where a Heart is led, wins the trick, unless a trump or the Ace of Hearts is played.” It’s equally amusing to think of an alternate-universe Magic where the card just reads, “Lightning Bolt” and you have to consult the rulebook (which would be a massive collection of three-ring binders at this point) to figure out that that spell is an instant that does 3 damage to a target creature or player.

One unusual property of CCGs is that the cards sometimes include “tags.” Tags are labels that have no effect under the base rules of the game; they are important only when referred to by other cards. For example, Magic features the card Llanowar Dead, which is a “Creature: Zombie Elf.” Creature is defined in the rulebook, but neither Zombie nor Elf means anything. Except that there are effects that refer specifically to these tags; for instance, the Zombie Lord that gives bonuses to Zombies, or the Priest of Titania that produces more mana the more Elves are in play. In another CCG, Legend of the Five Rings, Personalities tend to have a bunch of so-called “traits.” Some have rulebook effects (like Samurai, which lets you commit seppuku to cleanse your dishonor, or Cavalry, which lets you avoid enemy defenses) but others don’t; the Magistrate trait, say, does nothing on its own, but the Writ of Justice might work better if you put it on a Magistrate.

Reader John Rhoadhouse asked me if any other genres of games use this style of tagging. Well, RPGs certainly do. For instance, in D&D, some spells might be tagged as “mind-affecting.” These spells don’t work any different than other spells—except that, say, golems and zombies are specifically immune to mind-affecting spells.

But outside of RPGs? I can’t think of any examples of this. If there were any, it would be the sign either of a game that was crossing the line into being a CCG or RPG (like Illuminati or HeroQuest) or was getting tremendously overcomplicated. Any reasonably ordinary board game would find a way to either fold any given tag into the main rules, if it were important, or else leave it out as one more unnecessary complication.

In what was nearly a grievous oversight, I at first gave only a quick glance to reader DrObviousSo’s comment on my recent article hashing out a game idea. After all, I thought, this was basic economic stuff, like the second chapter of an Econ 101 class.

Then I realized the inherent assumption he was making, that I hadn’t been. The assumption was that every player can perform a finite amount of work on each turn. I had been assuming players would gain full resources from every controlled territory, like Settlers of Catan or Diplomacy or Axis & Allies. That left me with the thorny problem of how to keep the game one of trading and tactical aggression, rather than conquest. However, if you can only exploit a certain number of regions per turn no matter how many you own, the impetus for conquest is gone!

I’ve been thinking about this proto-game more and now have many more points:

• Players have 5 or so “workers.” Production is determined by where you have your workers go (forest, hills, etc.), the quality of those regions, and possibly other factors. However, you cannot increase your number of workers. So conquest may allow you better choice of resources to produce, or the opportunity to maximize production of a certain resource, but it won’t provide you a momentum-building resource advantage.
• Moving workers requires some small amount of resources. If a region you are working is “captured,” that worker doesn’t help on your next turn, but you get to move it somewhere else for free.
• The resources might include:
• Wood: Easy to anyone produce lots of, but needed for many ventures. Produced in forests, obviously.
• Iron: The cheapest way to improve your ability to attack or defend. However, not all players may have ready access to satisfactory amounts of iron. Produced in hills.
• Food: Important in small quantities everywhere. Can be produced pretty much anywhere, but some players may choose to take advantage of fertile locations or economy of scale, make extra, and trade it around. Unlike other resources, food spoils—a certain fraction of it is lost at the beginning of your turn if not spent. Produced in plains.
• Books: An abstraction for research and logistical planning. Produced in cities.
• Some other resource—perhaps Commerce, Trade Goods, or some other physical good?
• Some regions might produce more of a resource than others. For example, there might be particularly productive mines, dense forests, or large cities.
• To win the game, you have to complete five sub-goals. Three are common to all players. Two are drawn from a deck. There is a certain order they must be completed in, although you might be able to spend, say, Books to waive this restriction.

Intrepid reader John Rhoadhouse pointed out that “research” makes a bad resource because, after all, if a city is attacked, your scientists could just leave the city rather than continue doing research for your enemy. I think the “workers” mechanic makes this okay—you can just move your researchers to another town. And after all, the “workers” is just an abstraction for “where am I putting the strategic tax-collection and logistical resources of my government?”

Now that I have another board game backed up in my head, are you likely to see a prototype for it any time soon? No. However, you are a lot more likely to see a working prototype for Invasion as I get increasingly guilty about producing nothing on that front. Stay tuned.

There is a popular conception in culture that a game of Chess represents a purely intellectual match between the players; that the winner will be the player with the best intellect, strategy, insight, and patience. This belief is held almost exclusively by nonplayers, or players with only the most tangential exposure, because it shows false so readily with just a little exposure to the game.

As an example: I’m a smart enough guy, but have no particular aptitude for Chess. I played semi-seriously in a mostly scholastic field (but with some open tournaments) several years ago. Although I’m rusty, I could probably get back to as good as I ever was with a month or two of practice, which would probably put me somewhere near a 1200 USCF  rating. For a club player, 1200 is embarrassingly low. (A rough scale is 1000-2000, with masters at 2200. Usually only novice scholastic players usually end up below 1000, and this is due largely to “rating deflation” [a subject I might cover later].)

Still, if you pitted me against a dozen players of equal intelligence, but with no particular Chess experience, I’d bet you $50 that I’d beat them all. Maybe even with a time handicap or drunk. As far as I can tell, Chess skill is about 30% innate Chess-specific aptitude and 40% practice. 30% is left for some combination of intellect, patience, insight, psyching out the opponent, and whatever other factors are popularly believed to go into the game.

This is salient because the other day, I linked to a source that correctly pointed out this effect for Chess, and then incorrectly claimed that Go would make a better test of intellect. Ack. As nefarious reader Fuleng pointed out in the comments (read his last paragraph especially), skill at Go is just as highly bound to the amount of practice players have. Aptitude, intelligence, and patience are important insofar as they determine how much benefit players get from practice and how fast they improve.

I have activated a plugin called Akismet which will hopefully not only eliminate the spam problem, but allow regular users to add links to comments without fear of going into moderation. If you have any trouble with your comments failing to appear, let me know.

This is pretty neat. I don’t know if I would go so far as to use it for exploring dungeons, but it would be cool for tactical RPG encounters. It could also be used to project various board games. For instance, you could write a script to randomly generate a Catan board, complete with number chits, and project that on the table, and be ready to go in seconds. But possibly the biggest advantage is that you could prototype a board game without ever having to touch cardboard! This isn’t a big deal for the first iteration, but when you start making changes…
(From Kill The Wizard First)